US Politics: Guns versus Butter

[DMC]

12 minutes ago, Fez said:

From the questions the justices asked in Cedar Point Nursery vs. Hassid last week, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all seem to have no interest in making the kinds of massive changes that conservative activists hope they'll make.

How and when they apply this "standard" can, and usually does, change over time.  The problem is a majority of the court thinking it's ok to assume Congress' role in overseeing the implementation of laws in the first place.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

24 minutes ago, DMC said:

While the "legalist" approach to understanding SC decision making is indeed naive and has never reflected reality, that point is barely relevant here.

Is it? This part stood out to me on the issue:

Quote

not to mention dismantle much of American law.

That sounds like basically everything conservatives have been bitching about while they've also strategically been putting justices in place to just that. 

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

That sounds like basically everything conservatives have been bitching about while they've also strategically been putting justices in place to just that. 

Even if you concede justices have a "realist" (vis-a-vis "legalist") approach to decision making, that doesn't mean they've been this aggressive in - improperly - asserting their role in lawmaking since, well, FDR threatened to pack the courts.

[Zorral]

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

How and when they apply this "standard" can, and usually does, change over time.  The problem is a majority of the court thinking it's ok to assume Congress' role in overseeing the implementation of laws in the first place.

Indeed -- see: history of Justice Taney's switcherooey as he aged, ending up with declaring people of African descent were never seen as fully human and therefore never were considered possible or real citizens -- when in his earlier years he handled the legal procedures for manumission, which then resulted, yes, even in Virginia and other states, in the already born free African Americans and newly manumitted ones to vote, hold office, work at sort of labor they qualified for, own businesses, property and homes, legal marriage thus inviolate families, free from removal and sale.  By the time he was Supreme Court Justice, as embedded in his Dred Scott decision, every bit of that had been rolled back in his head, as having never existed, so he could claim  there never was dreamed of a time when African Americans could be citizens with rights that needed respect from any  white person.

Quite a few of those 'greats' did that switcheroo from what they believed and did in the 1820, by the end of the 1830's, and particularly by 1850, when the war over slavery was pushed into birth by the slaveocracy -- by so many means, including that kind of switcheroo.  Which made the war inevitable and thus abolition and the halt of the economy of slavery's ooze across the entire United States. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 minutes ago, DMC said:

Even if you concede justices have a "realist" (vis-a-vis "legalist") approach to decision making, that doesn't mean they've been this aggressive in - improperly - asserting their role in lawmaking since, well, FDR threatened to pack the courts.

This is a reasonable position to take looking backwards. I just think the Court has been so packed in it's own way today with conservative cynics that it's fair to assume their stated legal theories don't actually matter at all anymore, and that they'll just behave like conservative politicians rather than independent justices going forward and we'll continue to see decisions in which it's hard to conclude anything else happened. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

This is a reasonable position to take looking backwards. I just think the Court has been so packed in it's own way today with conservative cynics that it's fair to assume their stated legal theories don't actually matter at all anymore, and that they'll just behave like conservative politicians rather than independent justices going forward and we'll continue to see decisions in which it's hard to conclude anything else happened.

Again, their "legal" argument is barely relevant - other than to establish the standard has no constitutional basis.  The concern is adopting such a standard allows for judicial overreach that flagrantly violates separation of powers and, rather ironically, cedes way too much authority to the hands of unelected officials.  You can be a "realist" as opposed to a "legalist" and still be adamantly against that.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, DMC said:

Again, their "legal" argument is barely relevant - other than to establish the standard has no constitutional basis.  The concern is adopting such a standard allows for judicial overreach that flagrantly violates separation of powers and, rather ironically, cedes way too much authority to the hands of unelected officials.  You can be a "realist" as opposed to a "legalist" and still be adamantly against that.

I think we both agree, but I may have just been addressing something a bit different I guess. The hypocrisy as you laid it out is equally offensive. 

[DMC]

So that pro-wrestler running for Ron Wright's open seat in Texas?  Even Matt Gaetz thinks he's phony:

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Rodimer has remade himself again on a road he hopes will lead to Congress, though his latest ad has earned him ridicule, even from fellow Republicans.

The ad has renewed criticism that Rodimer, with no known connection to the 6th District, is a carpetbagger pandering to the Texas electorate. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., criticized Rodimer and the ad: "Fake Texan makes fake video of fake bull ride."

"We already have enough phonies in Congress," Gaetz said. "Texans, please send this Nevada man back to his true home state (where he lost two prior elections)."

 

[Fragile Bird]

You know how you’ve been worried about older senators? Thom Tillis, (R, SC) age 60, has reported he has prostate cancer and will be undergoing treatment. It has apparently been caught at an early stage.

[DMC]

Biden's true tax priorities

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President Biden is preparing to go to the mat for four tax increases worth about $1.8 trillion to help pay for his infrastructure and social safety net plans, advisers tell Axios. [...]

The biggest-ticket item would raise the corporate rate from 21% to 28%. That's worth $730 billion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center.

The other three would:

Impose a global minimum tax on profits from foreign subsidiaries: $550 billion.

Tax capital gains as regular income for the wealthy and tax unrealized capital gains at death: $370 billion.

Return the top individual rate for those making more than $400,000 to the pre-Trump rate of 39.6%: $110 billion.

It looks like blue state moderate Dems are demanding lifting the cap on the SALT deduction in exchange for agreeing to the corporate rate hike.

[Fragile Bird]

Gee, does nobody think a 25% VAT is a good idea?  

Back to Archegos for a moment. It looks like they were hoist on their own petard. They were buying so much stock in certain companies Archegos drove the stock prices up significantly. One of the things companies have been doing as their stock prices have recovered since the crash last year is to issue more stock to raise money to save their businesses. All the airlines and cruise companies, for example, have raised billions that way. 
 

Viacom decided it too would raise funds by issuing more stock, since it’s stock price had gone up so much, and when it was announced there would be a big share issue the price of Viacom started to drop, since more shares would be dilutive to the stock. The drop in the stock price triggered the margin calls.

The firm that kicked off the margin calls, Goldman Sachs, sold $10.5 B worth of stock on Friday alone, and reported their losses were “not material”. Nomura Securities, on the other hand, has reported losses of $2 B so far.

[Fragile Bird]

Eric Trump was appalled to learn that Biden has gone home to Delaware 5 times since becoming president.

Twitter is busy pointing out his father had gone golfing 19 times by this point in his presidency. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Eric Trump was appalled to learn that Biden has gone home to Delaware 5 times since becoming president.

Twitter is busy pointing out his father had gone golfing 19 times by this point in his presidency. 

Republican Playbook 101: Blame Democrats for something you're more guilty of.

That's how we get both sides are equally bad. 

[DanteGabriel]

17 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know how you’ve been worried about older senators? Thom Tillis, (R, SC) age 60, has reported he has prostate cancer and will be undergoing treatment. It has apparently been caught at an early stage.

Tillis is 60? I bet they still call him "kid" in Senate chambers.

[Fez]

7 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Tillis is 60? I bet they still call him "kid" in Senate chambers.

Imagine how Ossoff feels, being 34. The next youngest senator is Hawley at 41, and who'd want to talk to him?

[DireWolfSpirit]

I see Secretary Pete was in the news again.....walking back and disavowing any talk of a mileage tax being any part of Biden's infrastructure plan.

He looked a bit like a kid caught vandalizing the school grounds and being trotted to the auditorium to apologize....   

[A Horse Named Stranger]

18 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know how you’ve been worried about older senators? Thom Tillis, (R, SC) age 60, has reported he has prostate cancer and will be undergoing treatment. It has apparently been caught at an early stage.

Tillis is from NC tho, isn't he?

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Tillis is from NC tho, isn't he?

Ah, yes. I have friends in SC so I guess I automatically used SC.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

20 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know how you’ve been worried about older senators? Thom Tillis, (R, SC) age 60, has reported he has prostate cancer and will be undergoing treatment. It has apparently been caught at an early stage.

He’s a North Carolina Senator.  FYI.

[Martell Spy]

Biden releases first wave of judicial nominees
After four years of Trump and Republicans shaping the courts, Democrats now get their turn.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/29/biden-judicial-nominees-478442

Quote

 

President Joe Biden announced his first slate of judicial nominees Tuesday, tapping a diverse pool of 11 candidates for the federal bench.

Perhaps the most high-profile name on the White House’s list was Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — a potential Supreme Court pick — whom Biden nominated for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Biden announced two other federal appeals court nominations: Tiffany Cunningham, a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie LLP, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; and Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, a partner at the law firm Zuckerman Spaeder, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.